CLOONEY

George Clooney Told off a Vegas Hotel Mogul Who Dared to Insult Obama

What happens in Vegas . . . doesn’t stay in Vegas when you are George Clooney and get in an argument with a hotel tycoon over President Obama. Strangely, both the Oscar-winning actor and the hotel tycoon, Steve Wynn, have commented to the Las Vegas Review-Journal about an incident that took place two weeks ago at Botero restaurant, located inside Wynn’s Encore hotel—even though it does not seem that the exchange had been reported in past few weeks.

Clooney, who was in town to promote his Casamigos tequila during the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America convention, issued a statement via his publicist, claiming that he did indeed take issue with Wynn when the hotelier dissed President Obama, his longtime friend. Clooney’s recollection of the events:

“There were 9 people at that table. . .So you can ask them. . .Steve likes to go on rants. . .HE called the president an asshole. . . that is a fact. . .I said the
President was my longtime friend and then he said ‘your friend is an
asshole.’ . . .At that point I told Steve that HE was an asshole and I
wasn’t going to sit at his table while he was being such a jackass.

And I walked out. There were obviously quite a few more adjectives and
adverbs used by both of us. Those are all the facts. It had nothing to
do with politics and everything to do with character.”

Wynn, meanwhile, offered a different account of the events when speaking to the paper, suggesting that it was a remark about former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev that riled Clooney.

Wynn remembers that after a C.A.A. agent in their company made a Gorbachev joke, Clooney “stood up and threw a hissy fit” at the agent. “Then he sat down and started talking about the Affordable Care Act, and that’s when I spoke up,” said Wynn, whom the paper notes is a frequent critic of Obamacare. “He didn’t like that either. I think my discussion about the Affordable Care Act was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Wynn was critical of Clooney, a longtime supporter of Obama who has shared so many dinner and fund-raiser dates with the president over the years that we assembled a timeline of their bromance two years ago. “When [Clooney’s] drinking, he considers himself a close personal buddy of the president . . . He got up and said, ‘I don’t have to listen to this (expletive) stuff.’ The only person who got excited at the table was George, and he ran off to another bar.”

“Clooney’s fun to be with when he’s sober,” Wynn said, before issuing one final burn. “If you have a chance to drink with him, you want to get there early, and don’t stay late.”

Ouch, bro. We’ve all seen Ocean’s Eleven and can’t imagine a world in which Danny Ocean overreacts to a Gorbachev joke before storming off to the bar. (Heisting a casino, sure, but not this.) Knowing Clooney’s history of revenge pranks, though, we are guessing that Wynn will not have the last metaphorical word on this Vegas throw down for long.